The length of the already completed period of military service played an unofficial but exceptionally important role in the everyday practice of a military service (MS) soldier conscripted into the army for two years (730 days). The period that was getting always shorter and that remained to their return to civilian life (the “number”) significantly or even fundamentally strengthened the real position of a MS soldier within military community in barracks premises, and especially in a partial segment thereof (at the level “platoon, company”), a part of which the MS soldier was. The number was important for creating his ongoing social statute, mainly it determined the classification of a soldier in a clearly defined category (rookie, senior on fatigue duty, old sweat, super old sweat etc.), on which his position within the community of MS soldiers was dependent. The number was a symbol of the above-mentioned
variable process, and a lot of essential attributes, which left significant marks on the everyday life in barracks and outside them, related to it. The importance of this number was big enough to be called the “cult of number”.
For more than one hundred years, Czech ethnology has been working on and analysing diverse kinds of commemorative records, chronicles, and ego-documents. Alongside the research field´s extension beyond traditional themes, friendship books from the time of military service can be considered to be a new source for the study of personal experiencing the military service. Surviving exemplars substantiate the popularity of this form of a commemorative document. Friendship books usually consist of a section intended for photographs, and a section for texts or drawings. These can be made by the friendship book´s owner, or by his friends from a garrison where he served. On the example of several available exemplars, the text tries to apply two theses by Aleida Assmann: memory as remembering, and memory as repository. The author exemplifies to which extent the friendship book bear witness to personal experiencing one stage in the life of the man. While analysing particular records, the author points out diverse functions of the written and drawn records, and he indicates possible directions of further research.
Te study focusses on generational transformations in the perception of military service in the period from 1968 through 2004, as an important social phenomenon. Major attention is paid to oral-historical interviews with four contemporaries, or more precisely to the ways of (re)constructing their narrative reflections associated with military service in particular historical decades beginning with the 1970s with the overlap to the new millennium (meaning from the beginning of “normalization” after 1968 to the abolishment of military service in 2004). Besides the importance
of military service, the text focusses on the identification of potential topics from military everyday life and culture of military service soldiers in the context of the conversion from the socialist army to the democratic one, and at the level of constructing the individual and the group identities.